Quotes about few (4560 quotes, page 25)

“Kalidasa, the immortal poet and playwright, is a peerless genius whose works have won world-wide fame. The matchless qualities of his work have been lavishly praised both by the ancient Indian critics and modern scholars. (…) In modern times the translations of Kalidasa's works in numerous Indian and foreign languages have spread his fame all over the world and now he ranks among the few topmost poets and playwrights of the world.”

Ram Gopal (1925) Indian author and historian

Kālidāsa: His Art and Culture by Ram Gopal (1984)

World , Time

“We reckoned now that we were at the Pole. Of course, every one of us knew that we were not standing on the absolute spot; it would be an impossibility with the time and the instruments at our disposal to ascertain the exact spot. But we were so near it that the few miles which possibly separated us from it could not be of the slightest importance. It was our intention to make a circle around this camp, with a radius of twelve and a half miles (20 kilometers), and to be satisfied with that. After we had halted we collected and congratulated each other. … we proceeded to the greatest and most solemn act of the whole journey - the planting of our flag.”

Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) Norwegian polar researcher, who was the first to reach the South Pole

Upon reaching the vicinity of 89° 58' 30" S, 60° E, named camp Polheim, about 1½ mile from the geographical Pole. Several forays were made from here, one southwards and beyond the pole.
Sydpolen (The South Pole) (1912)

Time

“Calling the whole system "Linux" leads people to think that the system's development was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. That is what most users seem to think. The occasional few users that do know about the GNU Project often think we played a secondary role — for example, they say to me, 'Of course I know about GNU — GNU developed some tools that are part of Linux.'”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, Thus Spake Stallman (2000)

People , Thinking , Parting

“The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of rights — property rights of a historically extreme form — that makes their bigness bad.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Change

“This world has few redeeming features, and one is the capacity for people to love one another with great, enduring passion.”

David Gemmell book Legend

Source: Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde, Ch. 12

Love , People , World , Passion

“Dear friend, if it be your’s to have in some deep vale a home,
Where you may dream of faith and fate, and all the great, to come.
If such a place of tranquil rest be to your future given,
Where every hour of solitude is consecrate to heaven,
Oh, leave it not! let this vain life fret its few hours afar,
Where joy departs, and glory mocks the wide world’s weary war
Let not its rude and angry tide with jarring torrent wake
The silence that the poplars love, of your own limpid lake.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Translations, From the French

Love , Life , Fate , War

“I love baths. Absolutely love baths. I like to just draw a nice warm bath with a lot of bubbles, get a few sweets, maybe put them by the bath, put on really good music and chill.”

Aaliyah (1979–2001) American singer, actress and model

MTV Stripped interview (2001)

Love , Music , Drawing

“Some millions of other people felt the same helplessness, but few of them were seeking education, and to them helplessness seemed natural and normal, for they had grown up in the habit of thinking a steam-engine or a dynamo as natural as the sun, and expected to understand one as little as the other.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

People , Education , Understanding , Nature

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

Cleveland Press (1 March 1921)

“A boy of ten or eleven has a few great sexual experiences—he thinks they’re great—but then he has the bad luck to get caught and get in trouble. They try to persuade him by punishment and other explanations that some different behavior is much better, but he knows by the evidence of his senses that nothing could be better. … The basic trouble here is that they do not really believe he has had the sexual experience. That objective factor is inconvenient for them; therefore it cannot exist. … The sensible course would be to accept it as a valuable part of further growth. But if this were done, they fear that the approved little hero would be a rotten apple to his peers, who now would suddenly all become precocious, abnormal, artificially stimulated, and prone to delinquency. The sexual plight of these children is officially not mentioned. The revolutionary attack on hypocrisy by Ibsen, Freud, Ellis, Dreiser, did not succeed this far. … The question here is not whether the sexuality should be discouraged or encouraged. That is an important issue, but far more important is that it is hard to grow up when existing facts are treated as though they do not exist. For then there is no dialog, it is impossible to be taken seriously, to be understood, to make a bridge between oneself and society.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 38-39.

Bad luck , Children , Fear , Behavior

“The materials collected in this volume are intended to acquaint the student with economic principles as they are manifested in the tangible facts of economic life. A few extracts of primarily theoretical character have been included to represent important aspects of contemporary or historic thought; but for the most part the selections are not so much authoritative formulations of economic laws as concrete case-material embodying such laws, or affording a background of information which the systematic treatises on economics can hardly give and which the teacher certainly cannot often assume that his students will possess.”

Chester W. Wright (1879–1966) American economic historian

James A. Field, Leon C. Marshall and Chester W. Wright. Materials For the Study of Elementary Economics https://archive.org/stream/materialsforstud00mars#page/n5/mode/2up, University of Chicago Press, 1913. Preface

Life , Law , Teachers , Parting

“I was very careful to send Mr. Roosevelt every few days a statement of our casualties. I tried to keep before him all the time the casualty results because you get hardened to these things and you have to be very careful to keep them always in the forefront of your mind.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

As quoted by Forrest C. Pogue, in "George C. Marshall: Global Commander" (1968)

Time

“Communism is one of the few grave diseases we didn't try on animals first.”

Coluche (1944–1986) French comedian and actor

Le communisme, c'est une des seules maladies graves qu'on n'a pas expérimenté d'abord sur des animaux.
[Coluche, PC-CGT, Coluche : l'intégrale, 6, Sony Music, 1996]

Disease , Communication , Animals

“H. W. Nevison of The Manchester Guardian recorded that in 1907 in East Bengal “priestly Mullahs went through the country preaching the revival of Islam and proclaiming to the villagers that the British Government was on the Mohammedan side, that the Law Courts had been specially suspended for three months and no penalty would be exacted for violence done to the Hindus, or for the loot of Hindu shops or the abduction of Hindu widows. A Red Pamphlet was everywhere circulated maintaining the same wild doctrine… In Comilla, Jamalpur and a few other places, rather serious riots occurred. A few lives were lost, temples desecrated, images broken, shops plundered, and many widows carried off. Some of the towns were deserted, the Hindu population took refuge in any pukka houses, women spent nights hidden in tanks, the crime known as ‘group-rape’ increased and throughout the country districts, there reigned a general terror, which still prevailed at the time of my visit.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)
Source: H.W. Nevison, The New Spirit in India, London, 1908, p. 192 and 193. Sita Ram Goel: Muslim Separatism - Causes and Consequences.

Women , Law , Penalty , Time

“So before we end and then begin
We'll drink a toast to how it's been
A few more hours to be complete
A few more nights on satin sheets
A few more times that I can say
I've loved these days.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

I've Loved These Days.
Song lyrics, Turnstiles (1976)

Love , Drink , Time , Night

“Because the scope of the sculptor's subject remains so limited, we must be careful to concentrate as much meaning or emotion as possible in the few forms that remain at our disposal.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

c. 1960
Source: 1960 - 1968, Dialogues – conversations with.., quotes, c. 1960, p. 153

“One has to greatly admire the patience with which our society has come to terms with all the challenges of these dramatic times, the extent of which few of us could have anticipated in those heady, revolutionary days.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Farewell Address (2003)

Time , Patience

“Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 9.1

People

“Few people actually nominate themselves in this way. Most defer to the meaning-making apparatus of their culture, taking comfort in the fact that others have built a meaning nest for them. This built-in cover allows them to avoid taking responsibility and at the same time causes them to grow grandiose, narcissistic, and egotistical. As soon as you put on the robes of your culture and add gravity to your mere humanness by wearing the badge of your profession, your club, your gang, or your clan, you … refuse to engage in the process of personal meaning-making, with its requirements of honesty and self-awareness.”

Eric Maisel (1947) American writer

Source: The Atheist’s Way (2009), p. 66

People , Way , Time , Personality

“It is also true that without flashes of the absolute, which are granted to only a few, humanity would proceed in the dark, indeed it would not exist, because it would not acknowledge itself to itself! And as far as I know the flash as never preceded by explanations or preambles, and only a very small mind.... could fail to understand that eternal aspiration absolute and that the work is the relative, that to create is already to circumscribe; that to comment is to circumscribe the circumscribed, is to subdivide the divided; is to reduce to minimum terms, is to annihilate.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Boccioni's quote, from his lecture, Rome, May 1911, Boccioni's lecture 'La Pittura Futurista', 1911; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 55
1911

Understanding

“In adopting a republican form of government, I not only took it as a man does his wife, for better or for worse, but what a few men do with their wives, I took it knowing all of it bad qualities. Neither ingratitude, therefore, nor slander can disappoint expectation nor excite surprise. If, in arduous circumstances, the voice of my country should call for my services, and i have the well founded belief, that they can be useful, they shall certainly be rendered; but I hope that no such circumstances will arise and in the mean time, 'pleas'd let me trifle away.”

Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816) American politician

Gouverneur Morris to John Dickinson ( May 23, 1803 http://www.bgdlegal.com/clientuploads/Publications/Publications/John%20Bush%20-%20Gouverneur%20Morris.pdf)
1800s

Men , Hope , Disappointment , Time

“Although the MBh is the text having the most information about Vyasa, there are few references to him in Sanskrit literature that predated the MBh or is atleast contemporaneous with the early phase.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 4.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata

Literature

“I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth, should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause: viz. that though Reason is feasted, Imagination is starved; whilst Reason is luxuriating in its proper Paradise, Imagination is wearily travelling on a dreary desert.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Letter to his brother (1791).
Letters

Truth , Travel , Imagination , Mathematics

“If you desire many things, many things will seem but a few.”

Benjamin Franklin book Poor Richard's Almanack

Poor Richard's Almanack (1736), http://www.rarebookroom.org/Control/frapos/index.html November
Poor Richard's Almanack

“Single women often fear that the men they are going out with wouldn't be comfortable with less career and more child. Perhaps. If a woman selects a man with a lot of career ambition, she'll get what she selected. The solution? Choose among men who would love to be married to a career woman who valued his being home full-time with the children for a few years. Can't find these men? State your interest on your Match. com profile--the Internet's the best net to catch the right fish. You'll be surprised.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 83-84.

Love , Women , Men , Children

“One cannot, however, avoid saying a few words about individuals who lay down the law to art in the name of art history. Art criticism today is beset by art historians turned inside out to function as prophets of so-called inevitable trends. A determinism similar to that projected into the evolution of past styles is clamped upon art in the making. In this parody of art history, value judgments are deduced from a presumed logic of development, and an ultimatum is issued to artists either to accommodate themselves to these values or be banned from the art of the future.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 147, "Criticism and Its Premises"

Law , Art , History , Past

“Everything is overshadowed by the impending trial of will-power which is developing in Europe. I think we shall have to choose in the next few weeks between war and shame, and I have very little doubt what the decision will be.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to David Lloyd George (13 August 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 962
The 1930s

War , Thinking , Decision

“There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”

Will Durant book The Story of Civilization

Source: The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), III - Caesar and Christ (1944), Chapter 30, part 1, p. 652.

Hope , History , Success , Christ

“In Scotland you were allowed to starve but had to learn to read and write. Whereas in England the poor house provided an alternative to starvation, but education was only for the privileged few. This country has been a learning nation - first, last and always.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Cardinal Winning Lecture (February 2, 2008)

Education , Learning , Reading , Housing

“A few honest men are better than numbers.”

Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) English military and political leader

Letter to Sir William Spring (September 1643)

Men

“Our reputation has been hurt very badly in the last few years. We've had a go-it-alone mentality in a world where because of communications and transportation, you should be going exactly in the other direction.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_6170951
State of America

World , Communication , Hurt

“Many are called but few get up.”

Oliver Herford (1863–1935) American writer

The Cynic's Calendar of Revised Wisdom (1905).

“The afternoon is too tempting to be denied. It isn’t Paradise here, or even close, but the mimosa is in bloom and the air from the sea is cool and pleasant. On days like this I think of poor old Magnus Stepney’s evolving Green God, harking us all up to Eden. The Green God’s voice is faint enough that few of us hear it clearly, and that’s our tragedy, I suppose, as a species—but I hear it very distinctly just now. It asks me to step into the sunshine, and I mean to do its bidding.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 413 (closing words)

God , Thinking , Sea

“Because of their age — long training in human relations — for that is what feminine intuition really is — women have a special contribution to make to any group enterprise, and I feel it is up to them to contribute the kinds of awareness that few men… have incorporated through their education.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Blackberry Winter, 1972, Ch. 14

Women , Men , Age , Education

“We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

57 min 0 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean [Episode 1]

History , Appearance

“In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends — anything that will drag in a few more people.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Author Says Messiah Could Be a Woman".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People

“During the final months of the campaign, as polls indicated that I had a real chance of becoming the next leader, opposition from the supply management lobby gathered speed. Radio-Canada reported on dairy farmers who were busy selling Conservative Party memberships across Quebec. A Facebook page called Les amis de la gestion de l’offre et des régions (Friends of supply management and regions) was set up and had gathered more than 10,500 members by early May. As members started receiving their ballots by mail from the party, its creator, Jacques Roy, asked them to vote for Andrew Scheer.
Andrew, along with several other candidates, was then busy touring Quebec’s agricultural belt, including my own riding of Beauce, to pick up support from these fake Conservatives, only interested in blocking my candidacy and protecting their privileges. Interestingly, one year later, most of them have not renewed their memberships and are not members of the party anymore. During these last months of the campaign, the number of members in Quebec had increased considerably, from about 6,000 to more than 16,000. In April 2018, according to my estimates, we are down to about 6,000 again.
A few days after the vote, Éric Grenier, a political analyst at the CBC, calculated that if only 66 voters in a few key ridings had voted differently, I could have won. The points system, by which every riding in the country represented 100 points regardless of the number of members they had, gave outsized importance in the vote to a handful of ridings with few members. Of course, a lot more than 66 supply management farmers voted, likely thousands of them in Quebec, Ontario, and the other provinces. I even lost my riding of Beauce by 51% to 49%, the same proportion as the national vote.
At the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa a few days after the vote, a gala where personalities make fun of political events of the past year, Andrew was said to have gotten the most laughs when he declared: “I certainly don’t owe my leadership victory to anybody…”, stopping in mid-sentence to take a swig of 2% milk from the carton. “It’s a high quality drink and it’s affordable too.” Of course, it was so funny because everybody in the room knew that was precisely why he got elected. He did what he thought he had to do to get the most votes, and that is fair game in a democratic system. But this also helps explain why so many people are so cynical about politics, and with good reason.”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

page 23 in "Live or die with supply management", chapter 5 previewed April 2018 http://www.maximebernier.com/my_chapter_on_supply_management of "Doing Politics Differently: My Vision for Canada"

People , Game , Drink , Business

“I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another eating while reading.”

Amanda Filipacchi book Nude Men

first lines.
Nude Men (1993)

Life , Pleasure , Reading

“What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 39-40

Secret , Imagination , Question , Success

“In these days he promoted a bramin, by name Seeva Dew Bhut, to the office of prime minister, who embracing the Mahomedan faith, became such a persecutor of Hindoos that he induced Sikundur to issue orders proscribing the residence of any other than Mahomedans in Kashmeer; and he required that no man should wear the mark on his forehead, or any woman be permitted to burn with her husband's corpse. Lastly, he insisted on all golden and silver images being broken and melted down, and the metal coined into money. Many of the bramins, rather than abandon their religion or their country, poisoned themselves; some emigrated from their native homes, while a few escaped the evil of banishment by becoming Mahomedans. After the emigration of the bramins, Sikundur ordered all the temples in Kashmeer to be thrown down; among which was one dedicated to Maha Dew, in the district of Punjhuzara, which they were unable to destroy, in consequence of its foundation being below the surface of the neighbouring water. But the temple dedicated to Jug Dew was levelled with the ground; and on digging into its foundation the earth emitted volumes of fire and smoke which the infidels declared to be the emblem of the wrath of the Deity; but Sikundur, who witnessed the phenomenon, did not desist till the building was entirely razed to the ground, and its foundations dug up….”

Sikandar Butshikan

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. III p.268-69

Money , Faith , Religion , Home

“Although it is always somewhat dangerous to look for the cause of a complex sociological phenomenon in a single event, nonetheless, I believe that a cause can be made for the proposition that the present widespread interest in the quantum theory can be traced to a single paper with the nontransparent title “On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” which was written in 1964 by the then thirty-four-year-old Irish physicist John Bell. It was published in the obscure journal Physics, which expired after a few issues. Bell’s paper was, as it happens, published in its first issue. Bell, who has worked since 1960 at CERN, the gigantic elementary-particle physics laboratory near Geneva, has been known to claim that his paper involves only the use of “high school mathematics”; however, its six pages are dense with an extremely abstract set of arguments, which even professionals in the field must work hard at to understand. In fact, for several years after its publication, few if any professional physicists bothered to try.”

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

School , Mathematics , Understanding

“One of the greatest steps in self-discovery is to see that you are a machine. Only the few who have real knowledge will admit to being machines.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Knowledge

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

World , Law , Imagination , Idea

“Bharatanatyam is grounded in bhakthi. In fact bhakthi is at the center of all arts of India. Our music and dance are two offerings to God…This experience may only occur once in a while but when it does for that little duration, its grandeur enters the soul not transiently but with a sense of eternity. As one gets involved in the art, with greater and greater dedication, one can continuously experience throughout the few hours of the dance, the unending joy, this complete well-being, especially when music and dance mingle indistinguishably.”

Balasaraswati (1918–1984) Indian dancer

Her comment on the role of dance and music in veneration of God. Quoted in "Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life", page=28
Quote

God , Art , Music , Soul

“The magnitude of crimes credited to Muslim monarchs by the medieval Muslim historians, was beyond measure. With a few exceptions, Muslim kings and commanders were monsters who stopped at no crime when it came to their Hindu subjects. But what strikes as more significant is the broad pattern of those crimes. The pattern is that of a jihãd in which the ghãzîs of Islam 1) invade infidel lands; 2) massacre as many infidel men, women, and children, particularly Brahmins, as they like after winning a victory; 3) capture the survivors to be sold as slaves; 4) plunder every place and person; 5) demolish idolatrous places of worship and build mosques in their places; and 6) defile idols which are flung into public squares or made into steps leading to mosques.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Women , Men , Children , Victory

“Let us remember that those who kill innocent victims do not do so simply because they wish them dead -- terrorism is about killing a few to strike fear into many. Terrorism is a form of activism coupled with narcissism.”

Marc Randazza (1969) American writer

Fear , Dead

“The 16 August, 1946 communal riots broke out in Calcutta after a few days. I would have been killed by a Muslim mob in the early hours of that day as I walked back towards my home from the coffee house which I had found closed. My fluent Urdu and my Western dress saved me. My wife and two year old son had joined me a few days earlier in a small room in a big house bordering on a large Muslim locality. On the evening of the 17th we had to vacate that house and scale a wall at the back to escape murderous Muslim mobs advancing with firearms. Had not the army moved in immediately after, I would not have lived to write what I am writing today.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

How I became a Hindu (1982)

Home , Communication , Coffee , Housing

“Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.
What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.
But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could… fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case… who could interbreed with a chimpanzee.
We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. This is not a matter of speculative conjecture; it necessarily follows from the fact of evolution.
A successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee. Even if the hybrid were infertile like a mule, the shock waves that would be sent through society would be salutary. This is why a distinguished biologist described this possibility as the most immoral scientific experiment he could imagine: it would change everything! It cannot be ruled out as impossible, but it would be surprising.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid? The Guardian, Jan 2009 https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jan/02/richard-dawkins-chimpanzee-hybrid?commentpage=2

Life , People , Imagination , Question

“As used in the Due Process Clauses, 'liberty' most likely refers to 'the power of loco-motion, of changing situation, or removing one's person to whatsoever place one's own inclination may direct; without imprisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law'. That definition is drawn from the historical roots of the Clauses and is consistent with our Constitution’s text and structure. Both of the Constitution’s Due Process Clauses reach back to Magna Carta. Chapter 39 of the original Magna Carta provided ', No free man shall be taken, imprisoned, disseised, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land'. Although the 1215 version of Magna Carta was in effect for only a few weeks, this provision was later reissued in 1225 with modest changes to its wording as follows: 'No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or be disseised of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any otherwise destroyed; nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

In his influential commentary on the provision many years later, Sir Edward Coke interpreted the words 'by the law of the land' to mean the same thing as 'by due proces of the common law'.
Obergefell v. Hodges http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf (26 June 2015).
2010s

Law , Way , Change , Personality

“The world has recently been treated for nearly a decade to the unusual spectacle of a great empire deliberately taking every possible step to secure its own destruction, because its citizens were so obsessed by prejudice, or incapable of thinking for themselves, as never to perform the few logical steps necessary for proving that they would shortly be involved in a guerre à outrance, which could be neither averted nor escaped.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Powell's inaugural lecture as Professor of Greek (7 May 1938), from Greek in the University. An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 9.
1930s

World , Thinking

“So at the point where you make the choice, there is this moment where scores of men stand around, and they debate and they argue and they discuss and they read little signs on the road. And a barrel, a big barrel, full of cards and full of information. You sift through it: 'Oh, George went this way, Sam went this way, Louie went that way. What am I going to do?' There's choices being made. And they stand around and they debate, and sometimes companies'd argue and they split, and there'd be fights, and We'll go this way and We'll go that way. So it was a life-and-death choice, everybody knew it to be that. Wasn't just some casual matter of saving a few hours, it might save your life.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

About disagreements in which routes to take on the way to California
The West (1996)

Life , Death , Men , Way

“We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn’t destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there’s a better way: By developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.
Simple rules are a hands-on tool to achieve some of our most pressing personal and professional objectives, from overcoming insomnia to becoming a better manager or a smarter investor. Simple rules can help solve some of our most urgent social challenges from setting interest rates at the Federal Reserve to protecting endangered marine wildlife along California’s coast.”

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt American economist

Book abstract
Simple Rules, 2015

Way , Home , Problem , Time

“The only difference [between promoting a book and a CD] is when I do the readings. My fans are out there in full force, but it's nice to have all the kids there as well. I really love this evolution of writing. Writing is my core, and writing the book was like writing a really long love song. I have 31 pages to elaborate instead of three minutes. And my target audience, although it is children, I don't talk down to them. I want the parents to find it interesting. [Children] sit in my lap. I love it. I've always tried to turn an arena into an intimate setting. So, if I'm already in an intimate setting... You get to talk to a few hundred people, and you get to really bring them in, to have an exchange with them that often doesn't occur on the stage.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Reuters (November 17, 2006)
2007, 2008

Love , Children , People , Books

“The magic of drama is infinitely more powerful than the magic of trickery. It is as available to the conjurer as it is to the actor. The only difference is that actors take it for granted, whereas few conjurers are even aware that it exists.”

Milbourne Christopher (1914–1984) American magician

Milbourne Christopher (Magic: A Picture History)

“I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said 'billion' many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said 'billions and billions.' For one thing, it's imprecise. How many billions are 'billions and billions'? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? 'Billions and billions' is pretty vague… For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn't utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I've gotten over that. So, for the record, here it goes: 'Billions and billions.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

List of misquotations
Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997)

People , Star , Time

“What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own -- Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Tree By Tolkien (1974), p. 8-9

World , Reading , Holiday

“What I believe is that the age of creative silliness is not past. Virtue, as an economic theorist, does not consist in squeezing the last drop of blood out of assumptions that have come to seem natural because they have been used in a few hundred earlier papers. If a new set of assumptions seems to yield a valuable set of insights, then never mind if they seem strange.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

How I Work (1993)

Age , Nature , Past

“Little people have few passions, they hardly have anything but needs.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

People , Passion

“The population of Athens and ns, imported from the coasts of the Propontis…. They were employed for domestic purposes, or were let out for hire in gangs as labourers, or were allowed to work by themselves paying a yearly royalty to their masters.
… hardly any Athenian citizen can have been without two or three. The family of Aeschines (consisting of 6 persons) was considered very poor because it possessed only 7 slaves. On the other hand, Plutarch says that let out 1,000 and Hipponicus 600 slaves to work the gold mines in Thrace. The state possessed some slaves of its own, who were employed chiefly as policemen and clerks.
Slaves enjoyed considerable liberties in Athens, and had some rights, even against their masters. They did not serve as soldiers, or sailors, except when the city was in great straits, as at the battle of Arginussae… The worst prospect in store for them was that their masters might be engaged in a lawsuit, for the evidence of a slave (except in a few cases) was not admitted in a court of justice unless he had been put to torture.
Slaves were sometimes freed by their masters, with some sort of public ceremony, or (for great services) by the state which paid their value to their masters.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Companion to School Classics (1888)

Family , Justice , Personality

“After Bjartur had become a person of great worth, even he was prone to admit on occasion that life had sometimes been pretty hard in Summerhouses in the old days, but one has to take a few knocks if one wants to get on, surely, and anyway we never ate other folk's bread. Other folk's bread is the most virulent form of poison that a free and independent man can take; other folk's bread is the only thing that can rob him of independence and the one true freedom.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part II: Years of Prosperity

Life , Freedom , Personality

“The details of atrocities committed on Sikhs and Hindus given in these pages are not full or even a fairly large proportion of what actually befell. They are only representative episodes of what happened in a few villages and towns all over West Punjab and other West Pakistan areas. Imagine such things happening in thousands upon thousands of villages and hundreds of towns, and you will then be able to take in the proportions somewhat close to what the reality was-which, in the last analysis must, however, remain inexpressible in its full horror. The facts drawn upon are statements of sufferers of these horrors, recorded from complaints made to the authorities, from reliable press reports and from statements recorded with scrupulous fidelity and signed by those who made them, in the refugee camps in East Punjab.”

Gurbachan Singh Talib (1911–1986) Indian writer

Muslim League Attack on the Sikhs and Hindus in Punjab, 1947 (1950)

Imagination , Reality , Suffering

“Most of the original group [of elephants] succumbed to the climate, and he [Hannibal] was always begging Carthage for more, but the people at home were stingy. They would ask if he thought they were made of elephants and what he had done with the elephants they sent before. Sometimes, when he hadn't an elephant to his name, he would manage to wangle a few from somewhere, a feat which strikes me as his greatest claim to our attention.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part II: Ancient Greeks and Worse, Hannibal

People , Home

“[Footnote:] A few Cobras in your home will soon clear it of Rats and Mice. Of course, you will still have the Cobras.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Cobra
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Home

“To know me is to love me. This cliche is popular for a reason, because most of us, I imagine, believe deep in our hearts that if anyone truly got to know us, they'd truly get to love us - or at least know why we're the way we are. The problem in life, maybe the central problem, is that so few people ever seem to have sufficient curiosity to do the job on us that we know we deserve.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tie-me-up-tie-me-down-1990 of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (25 May 1990)
Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Love , Life , People , Way

“From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Bech, A Book (1970)

Secret

“I forgive the many for the sake of the few, the living for the dead.”

Lucius Cornelius Sulla (-138–-78 BC) Ancient Roman general, dictator

On calling an end to the sacking of Athens, after a plea on its behalf by two Athenians loyal to Rome, as quoted in The Story of Rome : From the Earliest Times to the Death of Augustus (1900) by Mary Macgregor; also said to be in a translation of Plutarch's works.

Forgiveness , Dead

“Bud (McDougald) was a true Darwinist, so in his view, when he died--to the winner should go the spoils. It was a free-for-all. A lot of people, Nelson Davis for one, used to ask me what Bud would have thought of the somewhat unseemly scramble that went on after he died. I suspect it would have flattered him. Had he wanted an orderly succession, he would have organized one. He certainly told Monte and me that he wanted us to take over--but he told a few other people the same thing. Bud was very skillful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn't within anyone's grasp.”

Conrad Black (1944) Canadian-born newspaper publisher

on the ill-planned succession at Argus Corporation in 1978
The Establishment Man by Peter Newman

People , Success

“As for an afterlife, there has been a general decline in the general acceptance of it as a certainty, and though a few rationalists may be pleased, to many people this has added a new terror to death. We are reluctant, in the main, to consider the disappearance of ourselves and consequently all we feel and know. Every man's death is, literally, the end of a world if he dies without hope. We have exchanged Gone Elsewhere for Gone Nowhere.”

Robertson Davies book A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Death , People , World , Hope

“By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness.... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory.... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)
Variant: By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory... Let “desire” be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

Life , World , Dreams , Hope

“Question: Is not the person who has been transported to interior detachment freed from external exercises?
Answer: One sees few people reach the condition you describe without their strength being wasted. The efforts of those who really achieve it affect them to the marrow. And so, when they realise what is to be done and left undone, they continue to practise the usual exercises, performing them more or less frequently as their strength and the occasion permit.
Question: Where do the pangs of conscience and other anxieties of seemingly good people come from, as well as the unrestrained latitude (of conscience) in other people?
Answer: Both types are focusing their attention on their own image but in different ways; the one group spiritually, the other bodily.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

People , Way , Exercises , Question

“The Prime Minister said…that where I failed, for all my brilliant gifts, was in the faculty of judging. I will gladly submit my judgement about foreign affairs and national defence during the last five years, in comparison with his own. … In February the Prime Minister said the tension in Europe had greatly relaxed. A few weeks later Nazi Germany seized Austria. I predicted that he would repeat this statement as soon as the shock of the rape of Austria passed away. He did so in the very same words at the end of July. By the middle of August Germany was mobilising…which…ended in the complete destruction and absorption of the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia. … in November…he told us that Europe was settling down to a more peaceful state. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the Nazi atrocities on the Jewish population resounded throughout the civilised world.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Chingford (9 December 1938), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 1025
The 1930s

World , Peace

“There is nobody who is not surprised of the small price of pins; but we shall be even more surprised, when we know how many different operations, most of them very delicate, are mandatory to make a good pin. We are going to go through these operations in a few words to stimulate the curiosity to know their detail; this enumeration will supply as many articles which will make the division of this work… The first operation is to have brass go through the drawing plate to calibrate it.”

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1700–1782) French naval engineer, botanist and agronomist

Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau (1776) l’"Art de l’Épinglier" (The Art of the Pin-Maker). Introduction

Drawing

“Before the eighteenth century the demographic impact of the profession of medicine remained negligible. Relatively few persons could afford to pay a doctor for his often very expensive services; and for every case in which the doctor's attendance really made a difference between life and death, there were other instances in which even the best available professional services made little difference to the course of the disease, or actually hindered recovery. …Only with the eighteenth century did the situation begin to change; and it was not until after 1850 or so that the practice of medicine and the organization of medical services begin to make large-scale differences in human survival rates and population growth.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6.

Life , Death , Disease , Change

“George Lucas should have distributed the "source code" to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.”

Gabe Newell (1962) American computer programmer and businessman

It's A Mod, Mod Underworld, Victoria Murphy Barret, Forbes, 2005-12-12, 2008-02-21, http://web.archive.org/web/20080501213031/http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/1212/064_2.html, 2008-05-01 http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/1212/064_2.html,

War , Star

“The Novice has been the focus of an alarming amount of attention in the computer field. It is not just that the preferred user is unskilled, it is that the whole field in its application rewards novices and punishes experts. What you learn today will be useless a few years hence, so why bother to study and know anything well? I think this is the main reason for the IT winter we are now experiencing.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: "Well, I want to switch over to replace EMACS LISP with Guile." http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/a6df017072f4c700 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Thinking , Study , Learning , Winter

“[The Liberal party is a] moderate Democrat, a type of Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to the right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe in fairly liberal social values.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

1990s, Speech to the Council for National Policy (1997)

“Of course, Charlie and I can identify only a few Inevitables, even after a lifetime of looking for them. Leadership alone provides no certainties: Witness the shocks some years back at General Motors, IBM and Sears, all of which had enjoyed long periods of seeming invincibility. Though some industries or lines of business exhibit characteristics that endow leaders with virtually insurmountable advantages, and that tend to establish Survival of the Fattest as almost a natural law, most do not. Thus, for every Inevitable, there are dozens of Impostors, companies now riding high but vulnerable to competitive attacks.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1996 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1996.html
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Law , Business , Nature

““A splendidly inept thing,” Sylveste said, nodding despite himself.
“What?”
“The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.””

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 15 (p. 323).

People , Feeling , Dead

“Few things will occasion a statesman so much embarrassment as a prevailing opinion that he will yield that to importunity which he ought to proffer to less forward parties upon juster grounds, and that whether he grants or refuses no harm can be done by asking.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 29. p. 219

“Ridgway and I climbed a ladder inside the tower to the belfry, spoke to the sergeant observer there, and looked over the landscape on the German side of the river. Then Ridgway turned to the sergeant and at length asked him to put a mortar concentration on a point of woods a few hundred yards away on the German side. The sergeant, unperturbed, cranked his field telephone and spoke to someone at the mortar position in the fields behind the church. "Joe," he said, "remember the dead horse we used as an aiming point yesterday? This target is about fifty over and 100 left. Ten rounds when you're ready." The rounds were in the air almost at once, and their accuracy was impeccable; but I was far from happy about the way my sergeant had shortcut the standard methods of adjusting fire as prescribed in the mortar manual. Although an artilleryman and not the expert on infantry weapons which Ridgway was, I was sure the "dead horse" method of adjustment was not in the book.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 94

Books , Way , Horse , Dead

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

Life , People , World , Way

“Strangely, I liked them (the Sex Pistols) until they made records. I saw them quite a few times before they actually made records. And when they did, it just became… suddenly punk had this enormous scope and was everywhere. Obviously it lost everything. And looking back, I don't really have that much affection for the whole punk thing. It really didn't mean so much to me at all. But of course, I would rather it have been there than not.”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From a radio interview with David Jensen (1983)
In interviews etc., About other artists

Sex , Time

“Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits.”

Robert L. Heilbroner book The Worldly Philosophers

Source: The Worldly Philosophers (1953), Chapter VIII, Thorstein Veblen, p. 224

Age , Reality

“What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

"The Scapegoat for Strife in the Black Community" http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420807/slavery-didnt-cause-todays-black-problems-welfare-did (7 July 2015), National Review
2010s

People , World , Question

“Now, I know there are still a few who insist that climate change is one big hoax, even a political conspiracy. My friends, these people are so out of touch with science that they believe rising sea levels don’t matter, because, in their view, the extra water is just going to spill out over the sides of a flat Earth.”

John F. Kerry (1943) politician from the United States

John Kerry, December 9, 2015, Paris. Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2015/12/9/it_is_not_enough_despite_promise

People , Water , Science , Change

“Managers today come up against a few more communication barriers. One is the pressure of time. Listening carefully takes time, and managers have little of that to spare. In today’s business culture especially, with its emphasis on speed, already pressed managers may give short shrift to the slower art of one-on-one communication.”

Fritz Roethlisberger (1898–1974) American business theorist

Carl Rogers, and Fritz Roethlisberger. "Barriers and gateways to communication." Harvard Business Review, 1952.

Art , Communication , Business , Time

“After viewing a few paintings and a drawing that I had brought in the day before yesterday, Mr. v. d. Kellen [Dutch art-dealer] assured me that there was absolutely no chance of placing anything of mine here, unless it was bought under pressure of a pleasant future, and I think he is right because he showed me various paintings, and specifically those that were closest to my understanding of art were the most difficult to place... I was astounded and furious about such far-reaching stupidity and the pedantry of the man [another art dealer, Herman Deichmann]. All the paintings present were beneath criticism, they were just the usual German Academic-stuff.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

The Hague, 1882
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) De heer v.d. Kellen heeft mij na het zien van eenige schilderijtjes en een tekening, die ik eergisteren mee gebracht had, de verzekering gegeven dat er niet de minste kans bestaat hier iets van mij te plaatsen, tenzij dat het gekocht wordt door pressie een prettig vooruitzicht en ik geloof dat hij gelijk heeft want hij liet mij verschillende schilderijen zien en juist degenen die naar mijn begrippen de kunst 't meest nabij kwamen waren 't moeilijkst te plaatsen.. .Ben verbaasd en woedend geweest over de verregaande stupiditeit en pedanterie van dien heer (kunsthandelaar, Herman Deichmann). Alle schilderijen daar aanwezig waren beneden kritiek, waren enfin 't gewone duitsche Academietuig. (Den Haag, 1882)
Quote from Breitner's letter to A.P. van Stolk, undated c. Sept. 1882, (location: The RKD in The Hague); as quoted by Helewise Berger in Van Gogh and Breitner in The Hague, her master-essay in Dutch - Modern Art Faculty of Philosophy University, Utrecht, Febr. 2008]], (translation from the original Dutch, Anne Porcelijn) p. 69.
Following the advice of his maecenas Mr.van Stolk, Breitner had shown his work to two Dutch art-dealers; In this quote he later gives his report and his opinion.
before 1890

Stupidity , Art , Understanding , Thinking

“Few poets have made a more interesting rhetoric out of just fooling around: turning things upside down, looking at them from under the sofa, considering them (and their observer) curiously enough to make the reader protest, “That were to consider it too curiously.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 64
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Fools

“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

Remarks allegedly made about Barack Obama to Ted Kennedy in 2008, as quoted in Game Change : Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010) in John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
Attributed

Guy , Coffee

“Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (p. 102)
More Classics Revisited (1989)

Life , Men , People , Happiness

“Few, few shall part where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier's sepulchre.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Hohenlinden, st. 8 (1802)

Parting

“The President should place the onus completely on the Iranian regime. There is a new Sheriff in town now who will not get rolled. America will not get rolled. The JCPOA is all about Making Tehran Great Again at the expense of all else. If the Iranians need a few days to digest the new reality and step up to the plate, that is ok, but if they don’t, it is time to ramp back up our leverage immediately and I am confident that our allies will recognize that they want to remain our great, willing partners in this effort.”

Lee Zeldin (1980) New York state senator

President Trump Should Not Recertify Iran Nuclear Deal http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/09/exclusive-rep-lee-zeldin-president-trump-should-not-recertify-iran-nuclear-deal/ (October 9, 2017)

Confidence , Reality , Effort , Time

“Beggars are a sure indicator that there are no Christians, or else very few and dispirited ones, in any town in which beggars are seen.”

Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541) German theologian

Source: On the Removal of Images (1522), p. 120

“Here are a few principles I've learned. Start something, and see who notices it. It's only after we initiate something in a system that we see the threads that connect. Usually, someone we don't even know suddenly appears, either outraged or helpful.”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

It's An Interconnected World (2002)

Learning , Appearance , Help

“They use [the term Isolationist] all the time, and they do that to be very negative. There are a few people in the country who say, "Well, that's good. I sort of like that term." I don't particularly like the term because I do not think I am an isolationist at all. Because along with the advice of not getting involved in entangling alliances and into the internal affairs of other countries, the Founders said – and it's permissible under the Constitution – to be friends with people, trade with people, communicate with them, and get along with them – but stay out of the military alliances. The irony is they accuse us, who would like to be less interventionist and keep our troops at home, of being isolationist. Yet if you look at the results of the policy of the last six years, we find that we are more isolated than ever before. So I claim the policy of those who charge us with being isolationists is really diplomatic isolationism. They are not willing to talk to Syria. They are not willing to talk to Iran. They are not willing to trade with people that might have questionable people in charge. We have literally isolated ourselves. We have less friends and more enemies than ever before. So in a way, it's one of the unintended consequences of their charges. They are the true isolationists, I believe.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Scott Horton, April 4, 2007 http://www.antiwar.com/horton/?articleid=10798
2000s, 2006-2009

People , Way , Home , Communication

“Charlottetown Patriot – in all that constitutes the real man, the honest statesman, the true patriot, the warm friend, and sincere Christian, he had few equals. Possessed of a clear intellect, a retentive memory, and a ready command of appropriate words, he was one of the most logical and powerful speakers we have ever heard.”

Alexander Mackenzie (1822–1892) 2nd Prime Minister of Canada

Buckingham and Ross 1892, p. 662
His Character

Memory , Sincerity

“And it's certain that unexpected new ideas are beginning to emerge. That paintings are once again beginning to be painted in very different tone from a few years ago.
The last thing I made is a rather large study of an avenue of poplars with the yellow autumn leaves, where the sun makes glittering patches here and there on the fallen leaves on the ground, which are interspersed with the long shadows cast by the trunks. At the end of the road a peasant cottage, and the blue sky above it between the autumn leaves.
I think that in a year's time — having spent that year once again painting a great deal and constantly — I'll change my manner of painting and my colour a great deal, and that I'm likely to become slightly more sombre rather than lighter.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote from Vincent's letter to Theo van Gogh, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, on or about Saturday, 25 October 1884; from original text of letter 467 - vangoghletters online http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let467/letter.html
1880s, 1884

Idea , Autumn , Thinking , Study

“Managers today come up against a few more communication barriers. One is the pressure of time. Listening carefully takes time, and managers have little of that to spare. In today’s business culture especially, with its emphasis on speed, already pressed managers may give short shrift to the slower art of one-on-one communication.”

Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) American psychologist

Carl Rogers, and Fritz Roethlisberger. "Barriers and gateways to communication." Harvard Business Review, 1952.

Art , Communication , Business , Time

“And is there no possibility that there was a period, and several periods, when man existed, and yet was not an organic being — therefore could not have left any vestige of himself for exact science? Spirit leaves no skeletons or fossils behind, and yet few are the men on earth who doubt that man can live both objectively and subjectively. At all events, the theology of the Brahmans, hoary with antiquity, and which divides the formative periods of the earth into four ages, and places between each of these a lapse of 1,728,000 years, far more agrees with official science and modern discovery than the absurd chronological notions promulgated by the Councils of Nice and Trent.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IX

Men , Age , Science

“Interviewer: Is it possible to abolish man's humanity?
Levi: Unfortunately, yes. Unfortunately, yes; and that is really the characteristic of the Nazi lager [concentration camp]. About the others, I don't know, because I don't know them; perhaps in Russia the same thing happens. It's to abolish man's personality, inside and outside: not only of the prisoner, but also of the jailer. He too lost his personality in the lager.
These are two different itineraries, but with the same result, and I would say that only a few had the good fortune of remaining aware during their imprisonment; some regained their awareness of the experience later, but during it, they had lost it; many forgot everything. They did not record their experiences in their mind. They didn't impress on their memory track. Thus it happened to all, a profound modification in their personality. Most of all, our sensibility lost sharpness, so that the memories of our home had fallen into second place; the memory of family had fallen into second place in face of urgent needs, of hunger, of the necessity to protect oneself against cold, beatings, fatigue… all of this brought about some reactions which we could call animal-like; we were like work animals.
It is curious how this animal-like condition would repeat itself in language: in German there are two words for eating. One is essen and it refers to people, and the other is fressen, referring to animals. We say a horse frisst, for example, or a cat. In the lager, without anyone having decided that it should be so, the verb for eating was fressen. As if the perception of the animalesque regression was clear to all.”

Primo Levi (1918–1987) Italian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist

Interview http://www.inch.com/~ari/levi1.html with Daniel Toaff, Sorgenti di Vita (Springs of Life), a program on the Unione Comunita Israelitiche Italiane, Radiotelevisione Italiana [RAI] (25 March 1983); translated by Mirto Stone

Hunger , People , Family , Home

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Quotes about few
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